This is where the narrativium went
by A.A. Pessimal
Summary: Fulchester. A sleepy city in the North-East of England where nothing ever happens. But like Royston Vasey it sucks people in. And it's getting ready for the birth of VIZ Comic.


_**Predestination**_

_**Viz **_is a comic. A comic strictly for adults. Its humour is rich , crude and scatological and comes out of that vein of British comedy that Chaucer would have known only too well – the ribald, the Rabelaisian, the focus on the physical frailties and peculiarities of the human body and of the mind that drives it.

As with the mainstream British comics it parodies and subverts, the central characters are usually children of pre-adolescent age who are granted unlikely powers and talents in unlikely circumstances. Their names usually, with the luckiest of serendipity, herald their destinies or tie in to the characteristic that will make them famous (or at least notorious).

But ten or eleven or more years before the event, how does the British comics universe _know_, and how does it contrive to bring together people who at the moment merely have strange names, whose destinies are yet to be fulfilled? How, for instance, is a future wife drawn to a Mr theMenace of Dundee, Scotland, to such a point that she doesn't mind the name, **(1)** and what evil genie prods them to name the infant son Dennis? This is not as remarkable as it sounds: things in the comics universe are predestined, after all, and free will is non-existent. This is where the narrativium went to on Roundworld, as Terry Pratchett might have remarked. **(2)**

But this is the VIZ comic universe where the humour is harsher and, notwithstanding the scatology, more adult….

* * *

Joyce moved neatly around her home, in the throes of being happily newlywed, performing the rites of tidying, cleaning, polishing with the blissful enjoyment only a certain type of new wife can muster. The house was new; the house was hers; it was almost certainly the house where she and Martin would begin raising a family.

She took a deep satisfied breath. Joyce particularly noticed _smells. _She liked smells. She wanted her new house to be marked out by its welcoming, homely, odours, the smells and the aromas of warmth and love and safety.

Oh, she'd heard strange tales about Fulchester, this north-eastern city , the "hidden gem", the "Clitoris of the North", concealed as it was in the middle of a triangle with Newcastle and Middlesborough and Sunderland at each of its three points. Fulchester was known as "the clitoris of the North" as it was fabulously hard to find, but gave a lot of satisfaction when it was finally located.

But the tales were that Fulchester changed people in dark and sinister ways, made them strange and terrible, made them conform to some sinister plan of its own.

She shrugged: she'd seen no evidence of this yet, and everyone she'd met had been friendly enough. Mrs Brady, the old neighbour who was looking forward to leaving work and enjoying a long and happy retirement, for instance: a nice old lady, bright and intelligent, even if she had the odd "senior moment" like putting the hot water bottle out for the night and stuffing the cat into her bed. No, it would take a lot of time before any form of senility ever got to Mrs Brady.

She thought of the neighbours, while spraying nice-smelling air fresheners around the house.

Mr and Mrs Gonad down the road, whose infant son was nicknamed Buster**(3)** by his mother. _He's such a load to carry around, Joyce! My husband joked about busting a… well, you get the idea. _

And Mr and Mrs Tucker. Joyce felt sorry for Renée Tucker. Their son Tommy **(4)**had been a massive fifteen pounds at birth, Not even pregnant yet, Joyce quailed at the thought. _He's a big bonny lad and he's got a big bonny appetite! _his mother had proudly proclaimed.

Joyce set another pot-pourri atop the lavatory cistern, its subtle essential oils already flavouring the air. She sniffed, appreciatively. _This_ is what a bathroom should smell like. Men had no idea. She hoped she had a daughter first. A husband and a son would be capable of really making a bathroom _stink._ Not for the first time, she wondered why they did it. All that…_scratching_… and breaking wind everywhere. Maybe it was like tomcats spraying, she reasoned, a way of marking territory.

Well, any son of hers was going to have to _learn_. Or her name wasn't (and she winced) Mrs Joyce Fartpants. _I really love him and it's a small thing, you'd feel mean about complaining, but my husband's name…. and he will not consider changing it. _

She got on with her housework, reflecting that John was a good solid name for a son, and hoping it wouldn't get him bullied _too _much at school. (5)Humming a Frank Ifield ballad, she carried on distributing nice artificial chemical smells about the house.

Fulchester. A lovely place to raise a family.

* * *

**(1)** It happens. While in an otherwise humdrum temp job for a telephone banking callcentre, I checked out weird names on the database and discovered eleven couples called Mr and Mrs **_Shitehouse_**. Now think about this a moment. That's eleven women who must have been so in love with the chap that they willingly took his family name on marriage. Mrs Shitehouse. They didn't need to do it but they did. And in Edinburgh, we have a Doctor _Fucker,_ and any number of _Wankers_ scattered about these fair isles…

2 In The _**Science of Discworld**_ series , where the Wizards of Ankh-Morpork inadvertently create Planet Earth and look into it from outside.

3. At age eleven, Buster Gonad was struck in the genitals by a radioactive meteorite, causing his testicles to swell to grossly disproportionate size. The VIZ strip follows his adventures, generally pushing them around in a wheelbarrow but having outrageous testes-related adventures

4. In later years, the grossly obese Tommy Tucker, The Great Fat...Person, who can and will eat anything.

5. And of course Johnny Fartpants, the child whose talented bottom could make the great Petomane put a cork in it and retire. Joyce is shit out of luck here.


End file.
